The other possible outcome might be for Solaris to become just a bunch of
system software that sits on top of Linux, similar to Novell's "Open Enterprise
Server" (Netware services without the Netware OS). Obviously it will be a
lot easier for Snoracle to port their stuff to Linux than it was for Novell,
since it's already unix.

Snoracle has their own Linux distribution, but it's really just a clone of
Red Hat.

Yes, it's still reliable. The issue isn't that Solaris is no longer reliable; it is that Linux has closed the gap. Nevertheless, die-hard Solaris admins will almost always tell you that Linux is strictly a desktop operating system. But if they were to look at the horizon instead of at their glass of kool-aid they would be able to see the end of their career.

I look around our data centers and I don't see anyone deploying Snoracle machines for new workloads. If I happen to see one and there's an admin nearby, they always say the same thing: "that's for our old [so-and-so legacy application] ... it'll be gone soon." The same holds true for H/PUX or AIX systems. No one wants to bother with the expense and specialized skillsets required to run these machines unless they have legacy workloads to support.

The bottom line here is that the "unix wars" of yore did come to an end, there was a definite winner, and it was Linux.

Yeah, if I'm doing the image building (which I am not), I'm going to be starting
from a ubuntu-inside-docker type image, and doing it that way, so I'll know
I have a pathway towards patching etc.

One of my issues is that we have already built a non-docker cloud infrastructure
based on AMI's and RightScale. Some new guys think that's not "cool" enough,
so it's getting rewritten as Docker.

I have zero interest in rewriting years of my own (and others') hard work
because some jackass doesn't think it's buzzword-compliant enough. So I'll
let the new guys do it, and if they screw up, it'll be like "don't say I didn't
warn you."

I would say that the ZFS and Zones would be two which still shine in Illumos / solaris for a production environment. ZFS on Linux is getting ground, but still not quite as stable as ZFS in Solari(sh) types. Zones vs Containers, I would say zones are much better on security as compared to containers, but perhaps things have gotten better... Also, Crossbow networking still blows away linux....

Fri Sep 29 2017 09:35:25 AM EDTfrom IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored

Aside from running software that was built to run on Solaris, what are the advantages Solaris has these days over Linux? ZFS, DTrace, Containers? Linux has equivalents of all of those now.